In the southwestern agricultural region of Western Australia, the clearing of the original perennial vegetation for annual vegetation-based dryland agriculture has lead to rising saline groundwater levels. This has had effects such as reduced productivity of agricultural land, death of native vegetation, reduced stream water quality and infrastructure damage. These effects have been observed at many locations within the 18 million ha of cleared land.

Commitment of local communities to protected areas is essential for conserving biodiversity. However, in many developing countries like Benin, former management strategies kept human from protected areas using coercion. Fortunately, more recent regimes attempt to give local populations more control on the management but little is known about local residents' perceptions, beliefs and attitudes toward the management of these areas.

Sustainable land management requires that water and matter (nutrients and base cations) are efficiently recycled within ecosystems so that irreversible losses of matter from topsoils are minimised. Matter losses are connected to water flow. The division of water into evapotranspiration that is loss-free, and seepage to groundwater or surface water flow that both carry material losses, is decisive in determining total losses of dissolved matter in a given catchment. Investigations of areal matter losses confirmed the instrumental role of vegetation cover.

Requirements for the infrastructure and functionality of dynamic models of the production process of agricultural plants, which are necessary for building computer systems to support long-term solutions in agriculture and land management, are described. The extent to which domestic and foreign developments meet these requirements is shown.

In the conditions of the Republic of Belarus there was analysed the experience of state regulation of agricultural lands rotation in foreign countries. There were determined the key aspects of functioning of developed market of agricultural lands, which should be accounted and controlled by organs of state authority. There were systematized multiple forms and methods of state intervention into market rotation of lands. On this basis there was developed the purpose, tasks and methods of regulation of land rotation for the developing market of lands in the Republic of Belarus.

The guanaco Lama guanicoe was the only large native herbivore widely distributed across Patagonia until the introduction of domestic sheep Ovis aries. Guanacos have declined because of competition with sheep for forage, high hunting pressure and habitat degradation. Península Valdés is a protected area where sheep ranching is the predominant activity. A ranch formerly dedicated to sheep production was converted into a private wildlife reserve, from which all the sheep were removed in 2005.

We used simulation modeling to analyze wildfire exposure to social and ecological values on a 0.6millionha national forest in central Oregon, USA. We simulated 50,000 wildfires that replicated recent fire events in the area and generated detailed maps of burn probability (BP) and fire intensity distributions. We also recorded the ignition locations and size of each simulated fire and used these outputs to construct a fire source–sink ratio as the ratio of fire size to burn probability.

Several methods are used to correct total soil carbon data in response to land use or management changes inherently coupled with concomitant alteration to bulk density (BD). However, a rigorous evaluation of correction methods has not been conducted. We compared original, maximum, and minimum equivalent soil mass (ESM) corrections to the fixed depth (FD) method and direct C concentrations.

We studied the relationship between psychological distress and relative resource and risk predictors, including loss of solace from the landscape (solastalgia), one year after the Wallow Fire, in Arizona, United States. Solastalgia refers to the distress caused by damage to the surrounding natural environment and it has not been examined for its relationship to psychological health. Doing so opens avenues of research that inquire into how land management might be able to support improved community resilience and psychological health outcomes after a wildfire.

Pastoralism is an ancient form of self-provisioning that is still in wide use today throughout the world. While many pastoral regions are the focus of current desertification studies, the long history of sustainability evidenced by these cultures is of great interest. Numerous studies suggesting a general trend of desertification intimate degradation is a recent phenomenon principally attributable to changes in land tenure, management, and treatment.